December 23, 2016

Depositphotos boasts an interesting "About Us" page that offers a more intimate look at the company than most such sites. It says they were founded in 2009, they offer round-the-clock support and website operation in 20 languages from offices located in five countries, and now host more than 50 million still and video image files for download.

The site offers videos as well as photos, but I will be focusing this review purely on static imagery.

When dealing with many millions of photos, search capabilities and response time are major differentiators. Depositphotos starts with a simple keyword search bar at the top of the page, and then offers additional filters in a margin-based sidebar. You can set criteria for things such as image orientation (eg: vertical vs. horizontal), number of people, and dominant color palette. Drill-downs under the "People" filter let you select for gender, age, and ethnicity.

Unfortunately you cannot multi-select choices… So you can't see results for people aged 20-60 for instance. First you have to select the 20-29 group and look through those. Then select the 30-39 group and look through those. It would be more convenient if you could see multiple criteria groups at one time if desired. There is also a filter to look for photos categorized into one of 37 conceptual categories such as Business, Celebrities, Nature, and so on.

If you are sharp-eyed, you will see an unusual selector at the top of the search criteria. A slider moves between "Relevance" and "Quality"… I could not find a description of how this affected the results, so I used online chat and got help from a support person. She said that moving the slider to the right favors results from contributors selected by the Depositphotos content team as featuring higher quality contributions. But this reduces the concentration on the exact search terms you might have typed in.

Depositphotos has borrowed an idea from Google Image Search as an alternative way to find pictures of interest. Instead of entering keywords, you can click a small picture icon in the search bar. This lets you give the search engine an existing picture (either by referencing an online URL or uploading an image from your computer).

The software then attempts to find images with broadly matching content or layout. Result relevance can vary widely, but this is a welcome additional avenue for finding pictures when you have an idea of what you are looking for based on someone else's copyrighted work.

Response speeds after changing a search criterion are excellent. I saw almost instant result updates after each selection.

As is so often the case, the image library is very heavily weighted towards Caucasian models who look American/Canadian/European. Looking for models who seem to represent other nationalities or ethnicities severely limits your result pool. I hope contributors pay attention to this imbalance and start uploading a more diverse group of models!

A selection of pricing models lets individuals choose the plan that best suits their needs. You can choose monthly or yearly subscriptions allowing a given number of downloads per month, or credits allowing a certain number of downloads over the course of a year. Savvy web searchers can usually find discount codes offering 10% off a license plan, and there are occasional sales. I just reloaded my account with a "Christmas Special" offer of 100 image downloads for $100, good for one year of use. By stacking a discount code, that was less than $1 per high resolution photo, which will make my presentation creation more economical throughout 2017.

I find Depositphotos to be a worthy contender in a crowded field. Wait for a sale and stock up. Wow… I hadn't even intended that as a pun, but I'll take it in retrospect!

I welcomed the opportunity to point out a modern design trend that I see as detrimental to productivity and comprehension. The best way to illustrate my point is with a tangible example that many business users are familiar with.

Here is a snapshot of the Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2016 command ribbon, including my own personal custom quick access toolbar, located below the main ribbon. You can put whatever commands you want in your quick access list, so my collection of icons is an arbitrary set of commands I happen to use a lot.

Here is the same command bar view taken from Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2010.

Let's focus on the two quick access toolbars, stacked on top of each other for easy reference. On top is the 2010 version, on the bottom is the 2016 version. (You can click on any of these pictures to see an expanded view.)

I was shocked to see how little the icon designs had changed in those six years. For the most part, the icon you were used to seeing as an old-timer using PowerPoint 2010 retains the same conceptual design in PowerPoint 2016. I say I was shocked because even though the designs are fundamentally the same, I find that I am consistently slower and less certain about icon picks in PowerPoint 2016. This is true even though I have the same icons in the same positions performing the same functions. What could account for the degradation in utility?

Microsoft has followed two pervasive trends in modernizing design. They have attempted to fit all visual elements into a standardized "look and feel" to make size, shape, line width, and colors consistent. And they have "flattened" visual elements to remove shadows and perceptions of depth in the image.

The change in any one icon in these examples is likely to be small and subtle. The change to the full set of icons and their practical use is significant. As my eye scans the full width of the ribbon to find the command icon I want, I have a harder time spotting variations to act as visual waypoints that help guide me to a spot.

Say I want to group or ungroup some elements on my slide. In the top (2010) version of the toolbar, I can scan along and very quickly identify the appropriate icons (third and fourth positions in the isolated view below):

But in the bottom (2016) version of the toolbar, those icons have the same line widths, weights, and "feel" as the icons appearing before and after them. There is no quick visual cue to differentiate icons.

Using the same isolated comparison picture above, notice the first and second icons. Those happen to stand for "bring element to the front" and "send element to the back." In the older 2010 version on top, shading and color fills make it immediately obvious that elements are on top of or behind other elements in the image. In the newer 2016 version on bottom, perspective is lost because there is no more shading and no secondary color gradients. I can see that the icon represents different shapes slammed together, but I don't immediately see the front/back concept. Flattening the imagery has eliminated the contextual cues.

What can we learn from this examination of Microsoft icons? Beware of arbitrary guidelines that impose too much consistency among visual elements in your presentation materials. Audiences need a way to differentiate between items so they can quickly find and concentrate on each component you reference. Also beware of blindly applying the present "flattening" fad. Judicious use of perspective and shadowing can help provide visual cues that add context and utility to your work. Don't be a slave to fashion… think of how your intended audience will interact with your materials and design to facilitate that interaction.

December 14, 2016

Lately I have had intermittent difficulties opening and sharing PowerPoint files in WebEx (both Meeting Center and Event Center). When I attempt to use File - Open and Share on my PPT or PPTX file, I receive an error in WebEx:

When I move or shrink the WebEx meeting window, I find a Microsoft PowerPoint error message hidden behind it:

I know that my PC has plenty of available memory. This is a spurious bug that has been reported in a variety of contexts on different forums and help boards. It worked fine with all the same software and same PC configuration just a month ago.

I have found that getting around the problem is simple. Just open the desired PowerPoint file in PowerPoint on your desktop first. Leave PowerPoint open and open the file in WebEx. It works perfectly. You can now close the PowerPoint application and proceed with WebEx as usual.

I have had a 100% success rate opening PowerPoint files this way. I won't even begin to guess what the underlying problem is or whether it affects specific versions of PowerPoint, specific versions of WebEx, specific versions of Windows, or combinations of all three. For what it's worth, I use 64-bit Windows 7, PowerPoint 2016 (with an Office 365 subscription), and WebEx version 31.

Microsoft Office 2016 is supported in WebEx for Windows or Mac. However, file sharing PowerPoint presentations sometimes causes an error. Also, file sharing multiple PowerPoint presentations at one time may cause the application to stop responding.

If you are a webinar host, you might want to keep that web page handy for emailing to your attendees. If you are unsure of whether your webinar vendor relies on Flash Player, you should check their website or contact their support department. If you ARE a web conferencing vendor, you should place a prominent notice on your website and on Twitter informing users of whether the Flash issue affects your products or not.

And I would think it goes without saying that this signals an impending death knell for Flash support altogether at some point in the not-too-distant future. Web conferencing vendors no longer have the luxury of riding out Flash to the bitter end of its run… We're there!

UPDATE DECEMBER 12 -- This may not be quite the abrupt change in behavior originally promised by Google. One Flash-based vendor checked operation on Chrome 55 and found that their Flash operation was NOT blocked. Click here to read an article from PC World indicating a softer move away from Flash thanks to some difficult-to-understand metrics that affect behavior on individual users' computers. My takeaway is that just about any site you have ever visited will allow Flash for the present. But Google plans to ramp up the threshold for how much you interact with sites in order to make them Flash-worthy. By June 2017, Flash will be enabled only for sites with the maximum "Site Engagement score" of 100. So different users will get different behaviors in their web browsers, and the behaviors themselves can change over time. This should be fun for administrators and support personnel.

December 06, 2016

I use Webinato quite frequently on client webinars, although I sometimes feel like I'm part of a secret society because of their stealth-mode approach to promotion and advertising. The company has recently made quite a few updates to the software, both significant and minor. It's worth running through some of the enhancements I have noticed.

The company has partnered with zapier.com to provide users with custom integrations between the web conferencing system and third-party applications such as HubSpot, Gmail, Marketo, Autopilot, Trello, Salesforce, and Slack. The latest additions allow integrations with Outgrow and Joomag.

The "private chat" tab for presenters now retains a history of the last 25 messages that were typed. This allows latecomers to see the current conversation thread in the tab, as well as ensuring that presenters don't lose messages if they have to reload the room or reconnect. The functionality now matches the behavior in the public audience chat tab.

Chat logs are now available in the admin's choice of a Word text document or a CSV spreadsheet.

Event coordinators can test registration confirmation emails more easily. The functionality is now consistent across confirmation, reminder, and follow-up emails.

Detailed participant information can be copied from the online display and pasted into other applications such as Word or Excel.

The video player not only lets you upload a video file or stream a clip directly from YouTube, but now allows you to record your webcam and microphone and save the recording for playback in a session.

An advanced Conference Bridge lets administrators open a full-functionality control panel in a separate browser window to mute and unmute lines, generate call-in IDs for participants (even if they are not logged into the web portion of a conference), dial out to a participant's phone number, and manage other audio settings.

I have always been impressed by Webinato's flexibility in meeting the needs of many kinds of web meetings and webinars, with the ability to display varied types of content. It's a pity that more people don't know about the solution!

December 05, 2016

I just learned about a stock photography site called Colorstock (www.getcolorstock.com). It features a catalog of curated images featuring non-Caucasian models. Blacks seem to have the heaviest representation, but the site also wants to represent Asian, Latin/Hispanic, and other multicultural mixes that can be harder to find on the larger, more established stock photography sites.

While I love the concept behind Colorstock, the site is still obviously in the early stages of development (as I write this in December of 2016). The catalog of images is much smaller than other sites that auto-accept almost any uploaded image. Colorstock attempts to verify images as being appropriate to the stated multi-ethnic focus before hosting them.

Searching is rudimentary. You have a choice of browsing nine categories, with distinctions that are sometimes arbitrary and non-specific. What am I likely to find listed under "Perfect for Bloggers" for instance? Or you can use a standard keyword search bar. But guessing what keywords might generate hits can be frustrating. I tried web conference, video conference, audio conference, webinar, audience, and lecture -- all returned zero results. Conference and meeting gave me results, but they are simply listed in a simple grid of 12 thumbnail images on a page. You cannot extend the number of images shown on a page, and you cannot filter your search by image orientation, number of models, or other criteria that we have become accustomed to on other stock photo sites.

As you start typing a search term, the page attempts to give a list of titles (with tiny accompanying thumbnails) that fit the letters typed so far. I was confused to see three suggestions when I typed "web"… It listed "College student walking on campus grounds" and "College student looking at phone." -- Not the kinds of results that I would have expected.

Pricing is different for each photo. You are presented with a price for a standard license or extended license. The price apparently tiers based on the resolution of the image, but there is no information about that resolution in DPI or pixel size before you purchase. Interestingly, you have the option to "retire the image" by paying more, in which case the image is removed from the online catalog and you can be secure in the knowledge that you won't see it used on a competitor's site.

Reading the licensing agreement page turns up some eyebrow-raising restrictions. All images are provided on an attribution basis. In other words, you are supposed to include a source attribution for every purchased image. You also may not use images in such a way as to imply that any model personally uses or endorses a product, service, political candidate, or "controversial opinion" (good luck fighting THAT terminology in court!) without explicitly stating that it is a model and the content is being used for illustrative purposes only.

So overall I'm keen on the idea of Colorstock and I look forward to seeing more search functionality and source images added to the catalog, along with better metadata information on image properties.